


A Storm of Moths

by eyebrowofdoom



Series: Untitled Aragorn/Frodo series [1]
Category: Lord of the Rings - Fandom
Genre: First Time, Interspecies, M/M, POV First Person, Size Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-02-20
Updated: 2002-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-25 00:01:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyebrowofdoom/pseuds/eyebrowofdoom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frodo feels so small and inadequate. Strider has such warm, calloused palms. Hehe. Set in the snow as the Fellowship tackles Caradhras.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Storm of Moths

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Mordelhin for beta reading.
> 
> Companion piece: [Feileacan Oiche](http://web.archive.org/web/20041209040302/http://www.nightsgarden.com/Feleacan.html) by Azrhiaz

He was so strong when he caught me as I tumbled in the snow down the spine of the ridge. Off ahead, Caradhras was like a great, horrid tooth biting the blue sky. He lifted me up again, his big hands under my arms. There was no give in him at all, as if he were a solid wall behind me. I remembered then how he had carried me down from the belly of the fallen watchtower when I was wounded by the Nazgul, and all over again I was ever so happy Strider was there. Surrendering my weight to him, leaning back against him for a moment, I felt quite safe.

I know this was a foolish thing for me to feel. I am not safe. I am the Ringbearer. I have not been safe for the longest time, and whensoever I shall be again, no one knows, least of all me.

I do know that I need to stop thinking foolish things and falling over. I am the Ringbearer. I ought not to need someone to catch me.

In any case the feeling of safety only lasted until Strider and I, both our hands scrabbling about on my chest, discovered I no longer had the ring. Then we saw that Boromir had it, and that he was looking at it, and me, in the queerest fashion.

There was something pressing into my back as Strider held me there, his hand on my shoulder, while he shouted at Boromir. Once Boromir gave the ring back, and Strider let me go, I saw that it was the pommel of Strider’s sword that I had felt, and that one of his hands was upon the grip.

I did not know what to make of any of this, except that I did not care for the way that Boromir tousled my hair, as if I were a child or even a pet animal. I am neither of these, for all that I may behave that way, falling down and losing things.

* * *

At last, it is evening, and we reach the tail of the ridge. On the lee side of a rocky overhang is a place that is not so much a cave as a sheltered crevasse. We huddle there for sleep, all in a tight row, forced to lie on a strange angle that is some limbo between upright and lying down. Legolas takes the end, exposes his back to the wind.”I am not so troubled by the cold,” he says.Legolas never falls down in the snow, never stumbles. If he did, he would never squeal in fright the way that sometimes I do. The way that I must stop doing. How much finer the prospects of this fellowship, if I too were an elf, and not a silly hobbit. Though I know it is not as simple as that, to think that I could be both an elf, and still myself.

For a while everybody was shifting about on the rock, trying to get comfortable. But now they have settled, and I cannot hear them moving any more. Next to me, Sam breathes, heavy and nasal with sleep.

I think I am the only one awake, and I am dreadfully cold.

Nonetheless, when Strider, beside me on the other side, whispers, I am not surprised. It is as if I have been waiting for it, though of course, I have not.

“Are you cold, Frodo?” he whispers.

His face and shoulders appear as he throws back his covering. When he lifts the side of his blanket, it is all the invitation I need.

He settles my blanket over the top of us both as I wriggle in beside him. And I am full again, full of that same feeling of safety I had before when he caught me as I fell. There is no point in my continuing to indulge it. Still, perhaps there is no harm in lying here for a little while, tonight when it is so cold.

He squeezes me to him and I have a little fit of the shivers, even though I am already much warmer than I was a moment ago.

“Ah,” he says, “we will be warmer if we are closer.” He begins to unfasten our outer layers, first mine and then his, until our undershirts are exposed. Then he embraces me again. Where we touch along our fronts, we are very close to each other’s skin, just two thin layers of fabric in between.

He smells like well-seasoned leather. Faintly like straw and horses.

“Better?” he whispers into my hair.

“Very much,” I reply.

I am delightfully warm, crushed up against Strider, his arms tight around me. I hope my face is not too cold against his warm neck and shoulder. His undershirt is open at the throat, and the hair on his chest tickles under my chin.

Strider has begun rubbing my back, to keep me warm I suppose. He needn’t do that, I’m sure, but I shan’t tell him not to, because it’s really quite nice.

And then he does something that almost makes me squeak. He moves his hand down my back, and down some more, until it is on my backside, where he rubs and rubs and pushes me up against him. He is indeed very keen to keep me warm.

Something nags, poking me in the thigh. He is not wearing his sword, so it cannot be that. But something is sticking into me.

When he moves his hands up again, they are inside my tunic and even inside my undershirt, rubbing my bare back. He is very kind, but he will never get to sleep at this rate.

I think I know what is sticking into me. I begin to realise when Strider pushes my hips up against him with his hand on my backside. But the fullness of the knowledge takes a moment to come over me.

It’s his member. It’s his hard member.

I know that sometimes members get hard in the night, all by themselves, when you are asleep. This happens to me sometimes. But he is still stroking my back, and I can hear him breathing. Even above the wind I can hear him breathing in my ear, rasping too quickly for sleep. Perhaps he slept a little before I came in with him, and that was when his member came up, and now it is still there.

I hope he will not be too embarrassed when he realises.

His hands on my back alternate long, warm strokes with light, ticklish ones. I can’t help wriggling a little bit against him, though I try not to.

He goes back to keeping my bottom warm with his rubbing hands. I am not so sure I wish him to be doing this right now, pushing me up against him, pushing that end of our bodies together.

Something has begun to happen, to happen with me.

It must be all this unbuttoning things and rubbing and pushing and thinking about members. His member has given mine ideas.

However shall I conceal this? It is quite hopeless with him pushing us together like this. His hardness bumps my thigh, and soon he must notice how mine presses into his stomach.

Now he has taken hold of one of my buttocks, and he is squeezing and kneading it.

“Frodo,” Strider whispers, at last.

“Yes,” I reply, sounding quite squeaky.

“May… may I help you with that?” His voice is very soft.

“What do you mean?” I say.

He pushes my hips away from him a little bit and, well, what he does next is, he puts his hand exactly in the place that I had been hoping he would not notice was there. He puts his hand right there and has a feel about.

I am sure my eyes are as big as saucers. He is peering down at me, but it is too dark to see his expression.

My head is so full of thoughts, like lots and lots of moths stuck in a jar, and I wonder if perhaps I should get up and go for a little walk, and just think for a while.

But now his hand is undoing the line of buttons on my breeches. It is the funniest thing — now he has my member out and he is holding it in his hand. The moth-thoughts in my head are packed so tight, they cannot even flutter anymore. His hand is enormous; it almost swallows my member up, leaving the tip only just peeping out. When he starts to move his hand, his grip is ever so tight.

And then it is not so strange any more. He works me in long, pulling strokes. I find myself bucking up into his grip, lifting my hips to follow each stroke.

It has never occurred to me to do this with a man. I have done it with a girl. Her name was Sarah, and I met her at a market as it was closing, and we ran away into a cornfield. She had tentative little hands that moved quickly and lightly, and she blushed and looked away most of the time. But Strider is a big person and a warrior. His palm is hard; his touch is a swordsman’s, as upon the hilt of a blade. When he squeezes me particularly hard, I make a squeak, a silly hobbity squeak of the kind I am trying to stop making.

“Hush,” he says. His voice is gravely, almost as if he is angry.

But I do not have time to be sorry, because then he makes me hush with his mouth. He eases my lips apart, and a big, slick tongue curls over and around my smaller one.

His hand is so huge and warm and calloused, and wrapped so tight around me, that I find I very much like his tongue in my mouth. In fact I like almost everything. I like the rock beneath my shoulder under the bedding, I like the way his hair feels between my fingers, the way his beard rasps my face.

I have turned into dough, and he is stretching me for the oven. He could pull my whole, near-liquid body through that one, tight circle of his fist.

I do not think I have ever moved my hips so frantically.

The wave of this has never crested so high, never broken and come crashing down so fast.

I make us both rather sticky. A lot of it is on his undershirt.

“I’m sorry,” I say. He is busy putting me away in my breeches.

“Whatever for?” he whispers, at last. But he pulls me back against him before I can answer.

It is very nice and warm with his arms around me. Still he smells like leather, somewhere between the smells of wood and spice, like the shelf where a fruit pudding used to be.

Drifting, I think of how we are in a cocoon of blanket in the middle of a row of cocoons, as if a great insect had flown before the wind into the crevasse to nest.

Only, I think that what we have been doing in our cocoon might be a little secret. The more I think about it, the more I am sure it is.

I confess that I do not think any more that Strider’s member just came up by itself.

For a long time I lie still. The bump against my thigh is still there. Strider’s breathing has not settled the way mine has.

A theory forms, and I stand atop a hill, surveying the lie of foreign country.

“Strider?” I mumble, at last.

“Yes, Frodo?” he whispers.

“Would you like me to help you?”

He is silent for a while. Then he says, “You mustn’t feel…”

“I mustn’t feel what?” I say. And I think I am getting a terribly dirty mind, because in a part of my mind that isn’t busy being concerned for Strider, I think that is ever so funny.

A moment later I put my hand on his breeches where he is hard and sticking out. He lets out an “ah” under his breath.

“I think you will have to help me with these,” I whisper, after a long moment fumbling with the lacings of his breeches.

“Why do you have such complicated breeches?” I ask.

“Utter foolishness,” he replies softly.

But then he is done, and I can reach inside and bring his member out.

“Oh,” I say. I know it is a silly thing to say.

“Indeed,” he says, almost under his breath.

I can get the span of my fingers around it, but not by much. My hand seems ever so small. I think I’d best use the other one as well.

The skin of his member is very soft, and it moves a bit with my hands as they move along it, one after the other.

“Little one?” Strider says, after a moment.

“Yes?”

“Will you lick your fingers for me?”

“Oh,” I say, “alright.”

When I have licked my fingers and wrapped them around his member again, it is all slippery.

“You are clever,” I say.

Hand over hand, I stroke him. He is very thick and hard, gliding quickly under my fingers.

He kisses across my forehead and all around my face as I touch him. For a while he slips his hand into my undershirt and pinches and tweaks my nipple. At first it is like a fiddle string twanged out of tune, but slowly it comes into tune and it is warm and good.

“Can you squeeze a little harder for me?” he says hoarsely after a moment, and I try, though it’s a bit difficult when you have to reach so far around.

He reaches around to my back, and trails his fingertips up and down it.

Then for a while he is sighing under his breath ever so piteously, into my hair. It sends warm air along my scalp.

“Harder,” Strider says, in the softest voice.

I do it harder, though my hands are getting quite sore. I think my shoulder will have a bruise from where he grips it.

When I thought I had made a mess before, I had not seen what he would do when he finished.

“Oh,” I say, again.

“I think we are even,” he says, rubbing at my shirt with a scrap of cloth he has found in his doublet.

He puts himself away.

Then his big hand is under my chin. I suppose he is looking at me, though what he may see in the dark, I do not know.

Then we are quiet again. And warm, and wrapped around each other.

He smells like leather, like pepper and nutmeg.

“Strider,” I whisper.

“Yes, Frodo?” he says.

I am just about to say, _I’m glad you are here_. Only I don’t. I am wondering if what we have done is one of the things that I need to stop doing. If it is like letting him catch me when I fall in the snow.

“Never mind,” I say. I say it because I don’t want to wake up the moths. The thought-moths in my head are all quiet; they have folded their wings for sleep. Later I know that I shall have to give them a poke to make them flutter again. Then I shall have to have a good look at them, one by one. There are so many of them.

But right now they are quiet, sleeping.

The wind has died down a little, and I hear Gimli give a little snore, two bodies down.


End file.
